This is a common myth, but it's wrong. Dietary fat is what is primarily stored and leads to weight gain during caloric excess; dietary carbs just decrease the amount of fat being used for energy, but can also get stored as fat tissue during overfeeding in a process called de novo lipogenesis (which is what you're describing) [1] [4]. Would you believe protein also elicits an insulin response? [2] So why not just eat butter? Well, it turns out fat can get stored without insulin at all, with the help of a little molecule called acylation stimulation protein [3].
Nutrition is harder than it seems. Again, it all comes back to calories in vs calories out.
[1] http://ajcn.nutrition.org/content/74/6/707.full
[2] http://ajcn.nutrition.org/content/66/5/1264.full.pdf
[3] http://www.bodyrecomposition.com/fat-loss/insulin-levels-and...
[4] http://www.bodyrecomposition.com/nutrition/nutrient-intake-n...
Which is both true and irrelevant, because the system that governs calories in and calories out is a complex control loop. When it's working correctly, weight is effortlessly maintained within a narrow range thanks to compensating adjustments in appetite and, to a lesser extent, metabolism.
When it isn't working right, people try to drive the process with their frontal cortex instead, which only a small fraction of population can actually achieve for any significant length of time.
So the most interesting questions in nutrition science are all around what effects satiety and why we have an epidemic of people with broken control loops. Sugar is a very strong suspect in that investigation.
And before someone says we aren't evolved for an environment of plenty, and our bodies just hoard every calorie they can get in case of famine -- that's really not it. No mammal simply hoards every calorie it can get without homeostatic feedback. Survival incentivizes balance -- hoarding a calorie means you don't spend that calorie today on something else that would aid your reproductive success. Which is why we (and most animals) have an extremely dynamic system to monitor and maintain appropriate energy stores.
What evidence leads you to believe this? There's no prima facie reason to believe evolution has adapted mammals to a glut of food, since for all but, generously, about the last ten thousand years, it wasn't really a problem that a significant portion of the gene pool faced. It would require some evidence to believe that the body has this capability.
http://ajcn.nutrition.org/content/71/3/665.full?ijkey=f7644b...
1. gain weight during the summer by eating high sugar, high starch, high calorie foods such as fruit, berries, roots, honey/insects, and as much whole fatty fish as it can get its hands on for a super high calorie kick. it HAS to gain weight in the summer, and does so easily on that diet.
2. during the winter it hibernates and burns nothing but fat, losing the weight and avoiding starving. people can do this too, believe it or not. fasted ketosis is a thing you can sustain for quite a while as long as you drink water.
this doens't prove anything in humans, but is an obvious counter-example to no evidence to believe that mammals don't have food glut adaptations.
but just for anecdotes' sake, what does an obese human typically eat? exactly the same diet. high sugar (soda/fruit juice), high starch (all junk food), roots (LOTS of potatoes, mostly fried), and extremely high calorie kickers like cheeseburgers and pizza to ensure a calorie surplus.
i'm pretty sure if a bear can gain hundreds of pounds in a few months, there's an excessively abundant supply of food.
if not, well, there isn't a glut, now is there. and there's soon going to be no more bear, either.
I thought it was interesting to learn from Alaskan's that when salmon are plentiful, bears will gut the salmon and just eat those tasty eggs.
Who knew? My mental picture had never included them possessing much of a palate. This article suggests they also go for the brains and skin.
http://grizzlybearblog.wordpress.com/2010/07/21/grizzly-bear...
At the biochemical level, we actually know a lot about some of the pathways that allow food and body fat composition to govern appetite. See, for example, leptin signaling.
At the anthropological level, we have good examples of several different pre-agricultural societies where food was abundant and obesity was rare.
At the whole-animal experimental level, researchers have demonstrated in both rats and humans that when you give an animal unlimited access to food, it doesn't gain unlimited weight. It reaches a plateau and then resists further changes up or down from there. Interestingly enough, rats fed a diet of unlimited human junk food reach a much higher plateau than rats fed a diet of unlimited standard rat chow.
And finally, we all know people (perhaps even our younger selves) who never consciously worry about what they're eating yet undergo very little fluctuation in weight. Judged from the perspective of a control system designer, getting that kind of stable outcome from wildly varying inputs doesn't just happen by luck. And indeed, experimenters have shown repeatedly that "naturally lean" people experience reduced appetite in the days following a period of overeating. You can even deliberately perturb the system by force-feeding them, and they bounce right back to their long-term weight thanks to reduced appetite and increased metabolism.
Like with anything else, including alcohol or even heroine (altho that one very limited) - nothing in reasonable limitations will kill you. If you have strong will then you keep your brain on leech and treat it as a pleasure you consume time to time in limitations. If you eat it daily in large quanitities, then you helping yourself to get sick.
The first thing to losing weight is to get serious about how much you are eating. Write it all down. People tell me all the time they don't understand why they are gaining weight, and then we go through a day of eating. It's not just sugar or fat or some other thing someone has said trying to sell a book, it is simply eating too much. Oftentimes people don't even realize it.
I had the opposite problem with I started weight lifting years ago. I simply couldn't gain weight, and thought it was impossible based on how much I thought I ate. When I started writing things down I realized I was barely breaking 2k calories/day if I was lucky. It took concerted effort to eat more, and results quickly followed. Now I'm older and am not as active, so I simply don't eat as much. My weight has stayed the same for a long time.
Better to avoid the problem entirely in the first place. If you don't feel hungry (stable blood sugar) eating becomes a moot point/routine task.
Salt and sugar save low aroma food (>80% processed food). Their combined power on the human body is vicious.
How sweet everything is.
At places like Chili's or Applebees she ended up ordering appetizers and eating half of that as a meal. I got a regular meal but I knew in advance I would be taking it to go halfway through, as I usually do.
Usually your comments are good so I am going to believe you are sincere here.
Somewhat related I am one of those people who needs to make a change as I get >1000 calories from soda a day. I did quit years ago (just cold turkey) and after the initial headaches and tiredness the biggest change I saw was that I was constantly hungry. Much like quitting smoking made me for quite a while.
Increasing portion sizes (see for example the increasing sizes of servings in McDonalds menus) mean that people now drink huge quantities of this sugary drink.
The volume of drink, the quantity of the sugar, is the problem.
Two cookies are not a problem. Two packets of cookies are a problem.
eg. It's not THIS it's THAT. (It's not sugar, it's sugar in excess.)
12 cans of Coke a day = healthy diet?
Which is nicely analogous to telling someone to focus on calories in versus calories out.
In fact, numerous studies have found exactly this.
The problem is that moderate consumption of either is known to cause overconsumption.
So, perhaps not so fine in an environment of abundance.
Not everyone is obese. Even in the US, where obesity is at its worst, it's around 35%. That suggests that 65% of people can consume sugar and then not become obese.
Certainly amongst my peer group of middle class graduates almost everyone eats sugar and almost nobody is obese. That suggests that people are perfectly capable of consuming moderate amounts of sugar without becoming rampant sugar addicts rapidly turning obese.
The physical cause of obesity may be the overconsumption of simple carbohydrates, but the socioeconomic distribution of obesity suggests that there's many factors which drive that consumption.
Try having the same diet when you're in your 40s and I am sure you will have a different experience.
So counterexamples are not disproof. You'd have to construct a lab experiment with enough subjects and measure over a long enough time.
Unfortunately, it's difficult to construct a perfect double-blind study, because people usually know if they are eating sugar or not. Maybe if artificial sweeteners are good enough it might work, or maybe the experiment would still be convincing even if the subjects know.
I'd be interested to see the results of such a study for sugar and heroin. I probably should be able to cite one before I claim it as fact, but I didn't think it was a very controversial claim. I think it's mainly a question of degree.
The negative effects we see in addicts today are mostly caused by two factors: (1) if you shoot up, needle - especially dirty needles - can be a vector for infection and diseases such as HIV, (2) if you can't get a reliable supply of known potency you can go through withdrawal or overdose - the wild swings are harmful. (Impurities in the drug can also be harmful depending on what it's been "cut" with.)
So if the drug were legal it'd be fine. But when it's illegal, some characteristics of an illegal market make it bad for people - those are problems related to the illegality, not really having much to do with the drug itself.
Healthy? Maybe not.
Furthermore there are many practices in cattle raising that allow for more fat and muscle gain without increasing calories but instead changing other factors.
The following shows the hormone regimen for cattle to increase fat without changing the calories in aspect of the equation.
http://www.gov.mb.ca/agriculture/livestock/production/beef/g...
Do you have a source for this? The sources [1], [4] you quoted don't seem to say that, at least in a way I could understand.
Yeah, try telling me you get fat from eating proteins and fat.
Stop your nonsense. Its chemistry.
"This is why hemoglobin A1C is frequently used in studies that try to correlate blood sugar control to various disease processes like Alzheimer’s, mild cognitive impairment, and coronary artery disease. It’s well documented that glycated hemoglobin is a powerful risk factor for diabetes, but it’s also been correlated with risk for stroke, coronary heart disease, and death from other illnesses. These correlations have been shown to be strongest with any measurement of hemoglobin A1C above 6.0 percent. We now have evidence to show that elevated hemoglobin A1C is associated with changes in brain size. In one particularly profound study, published in the journal Neurology, researchers looking at MRIs to determine which lab test correlated best with brain atrophy found that the hemoglobin A1C demonstrated the most powerful relationship.[2]”
[1] Perlmutter, David. “Grain Brain.”
[2] “C. Enzinger, et al., “Risk Factors for Progression of Brain Atrophy in Aging: Six-year Follow-up of Normal Subjects,” Neurology 64, no. 10 (May 24, 2005): 1704–11.”
And it's also perfectly possible to be a moderate consumer of sugar and have low hemoglobin A1C depending on other lifestyle factors.
And sugar is culprit behind overeating and obesity.
Now, eat 500 calories of fat (heavy cream, bacon, pork belly, etc). Wait 15-20 minutes, how hungry are you?
I've done this experiment a few times now, and without fail, I crave more food after the sugar and can't eat another bite after the fat.
>On a ketogenic diet I rarely even think about food - I am rarely hungry.
You probably did lower your caloric intake. The trick is that you did it in a way that it did not bother you. In other words, you ate a healthy diet.
Which it is. But I find it bizarre that people will fall back to this defense, or, at least, I find it bizarre how many people still think this is some sort of defense, when it is in fact the exact, total, polar opposite of the position they think they are defending.
At this point we are just arguing semantics. If you eat fewer calories, regardless of how you accomplish it, you will lose weight. Yes, it is easier to lose weight with healthy diet.
You can lose weight focusing solely on calories. It is easier to keep your calories in check while eating wholesome foods for numerous reasons, but at the end of the day, the gain/loss is governed by calories.
Any one-sided diet can work if your awareness rises. More wholesome diets might even work better in the long run.
I've been part of diet communities with keto dieters for awhile and I have met people who have gained weight on keto. These people seem to not be as satiated from things like bacon as more successful keto dieters.
I eat a more diverse diet now. I stay away from foods that cause me to overeat like fries.
calories in, calories out.
Carbs in general (ones that metabolize mostly into glucose) have been widely available for a long time. They are also processed in a more "normal" way than fructose.
It might still be a good idea to reduce carbs, but I'm skeptical that the ketogenic diet is healthy.
Unfortunately, dieting will not change anything unless you really change your lifestyle and eating habits forever.
Any diet is a failure if it's just something you do for some time, just to get back to the old habits once you shaved off some pounds. Because of that, keto diets are not a good solution, since people get the wrong assumption about dieting ("I can eat like an animal and then do some keto to get fit again") and they're very likely to induce some sort of weight cycling (the so called yo-yo effect).
Therefore keto should be used with caution, by people who do that with knowledge and with the help of a professional. Sticking to healthier eating habits over time is much more difficult and you need a very, very strong commitment. At some point in time, though, there's a switch that finally clicks and everything becomes more easy. Exercise should be a big part of this journey.
In the end it's much more rewarding and you'll discover a whole range of benefits. Weight loss will be just an insignificant detail, then.
They aren't? Are there strong hints* that this is true? I didn't see any so far, but that may be due to my limited research.
For me, keto naturally reduces calories. I'm not the kind of person to overeat bacon or butter. I like them, but I won't overeat them. Whereas when I was vegan I found myself overeating a variety of things.
The closer people move to actual food and sanity, the further I feel we'll move away from obesity. Rehashed sensationalism helps few other than diet gurus and their brand.
Try it. Drink it and come back in 15-20 minutes and let me know.
Then try 11 slices of pan fried bacon (43 cal/slice according to google) and then tell me how hungry you are in 15-20 minutes.
Okay, how about half a cup of heavy cream instead of bacon. I guarantee you won't feel hungry 15-20 minutes late.
If Lustig's views stop people from pounding soda all the way to the diabetician's office, then great, but if they start putting you off of fruit and vegetables then I think it becomes highly questionable.
What we don't agree on are the roles of starches, sugars (added and in drinks), and fats. What we do know is that the combination of both leads to bad things in excess. What a lot of folks that have cut out sugar/most carbohydrates will tell you, is that they feel much much better and lose weight easily and effortlessly, even without making a conscious effort to restrict calories or exercise more.
On the other hand, many people on high-carb, low-fat diets struggle to lose weight without careful caloric restriction and additional exercise.
Of course, anecdotal and such, but come on - it is sorta kinda obvious here.
If you have evidence to the contrary, preferably including a forum of people who have had success, but even just the common name of such a diet, I'd be quite interested to read about it.
> Take raw potato with <1g of fat on a kilo, and french fries that have 154g of fat per kilo! Are carbs from potato the problem?
From anything I've read, the answer is yes, the carbs are the technical problem, but another at least as important factor is: french fries are delicious, so you'll eat 3 times as many.
Well, there is no consensus about common name and there are more than one approaches to this kind of eating (high carb, low fat, low protein) I will list you some references so you can see what I'm talking about. In no special order:
http://www.heartattackproof.com/articles.htm http://www.drmcdougall.com/health/shopping/books/starch-solu... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4XVf36nwraw http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d5wfMNNr3ak http://www.nealbarnard.org/ http://www.youtube.com/user/PrimitiveNutrition/videos http://nutritionstudies.org/
Here's another experiment - take 300 million people, tell them to eat primarily carbohydrates and limit their fats. Observe the trend for 30 years.
When you say "doughnut" you mean this[1], right? If so that's 100%, Grade A nonsense and abruptly ends any consideration I was giving your comment.
There are many foods that looked at out of context aren't particularly "healthy" if considered against an average modern sedentary lifestyle but which are sources of either quick energy or useful protein which can be beneficial for weight management and overall health if properly utilized.
All of this is why talking about diet without also talking about exercise is useless.
My completely non-scientific belief is that while over-consumption of sugar isn't a great thing, the primary thing making us fat is that we've switched to a massively sedentary lifestyle on average. We aren't toiling in the factory or on the farm or walking door to door selling vacuums, and mostly that's a good thing because those jobs aren't particularly interesting for many of us, but at the same time our bodies aren't really evolved for sitting down 8-16 hours a day.
Once every 2 months or so, I buy one of these[1]. But there's no way it can be "part of a healthy diet just like anything else", as the person I replied to seems to think. It is an exception to my healthy diet, not part of it. I deviate from my healthy diet once every 6 - 8 weeks to indulge. I'm also aware of Micheal Phelp's diet[2] would work for me too if I could swim back & forth for at least 4 hours a day instead of standing[3] in front of a computer for 8+ hrs.
1. http://www.militarydiscountscentral.com/wp-content/uploads/2...
2. http://blogs.wsj.com/health/2008/08/13/the-michael-phelps-di...
3. I have a standing desk and never use my chair.
(insert appropriate YouTube link here)
This simple fact is a very big win for science, but it is very unpopular - no one likes to actually calculate calories, so a lot of people prescribe to dubious unbalanced diets that sound convincing by catering to their food preferences and aesthetics.
No regulation short of destroying consumer choice and imposing an approved-foods-list will defeat obesity. Trying to just limit sugar is pointless because industry and consumers will substitute the current form of sugar for something else, raising the cost of food in the meantime, which will hurt the poor. (Just like an import quota on sugar in the US has not reduced consumption of sweets, because sugar got substituted for HFCS).
I think the best way to solve obesity is to find some chemicals that satisfy appetite easily and cheaply or sweeteners that are as good or better tasting than sugars, but are not caloric. (Aspartame is very sweet, but tastes significantly worse than sugar).
Left to their own devices, industry will NOT comply so regulation is a valid tool to stave off the massive public health risk that unchecked industry has introduced.
While muscle growth does require sugars, it is not required in anywhere near the amounts present in every single food on shelves.
Your arguments reek of industry propoganda and astroturfing. They've got an air of populism and fallisciousness about them... "But sugar is needed for muscles... See science?"
Come on... You're one of those paid forum commenters we keep reading about right? Some guerilla marketer working for big sugar? Is it an agency with lots if clients or just one topic?
Can they?
If you examine the diets of healthy people, you'll see that some of them eat donuts occasionally. That would seem to indicate yes.
The OP seems to make a really big point out of justifying sugar as 'not a toxin' just because you can consume sugar without killing yourself or instantly getting fat. There's probably some denial and 'I like eating sugar' sentiment going on there or something.
I didn't find any convincing arguments as to why adding sugar to processed food, or consciously consuming suger because you think you need it is warranted. Alcohol can be part of healthy diet as well, or motor oil, for that matter. That doesn't mean these things are healthy, or that there aren't any health benefits not consuming those.
Alcohol is not a nutrient.
Also, how is alcohol less of a nutrient than sugar? It gets metabolised to carbohydrates your body can use as energy, store as fat, etc. Apart from the fact there's an extra metabolic step required to convert them to carbohydrates your body can burn as fuel, there isn't much difference compared to sugar, at least not from a nutritional point of view (obviously this says nothing about other health effects alcohol has).
You're totally right about sugar being a problematic source of energy. A thin spread of honey on toast? Tasty and not so bad. A fistful of sugar in a drink twice a day every day? Obviously really bad.
One of the problems with the "sugar is toxic" mantra is that we risk making the same mistake as that "fat is evil" crowd. Selling a sack of sugar (sweets / candy) as "FAT FREE!" Is obviously really bad.
Alcohol isn't a nutrient, but the carbohydrates it provides are. But alcohol is actually toxic.
“Somehow we have been led to believe that dietary fat will raise our cholesterol, which will in turn increase our risk for heart attacks and strokes. This notion continues to prevail despite research from nineteen years ago that proved otherwise. In 1994, the Journal of the American Medical Association published a trial that compared older adults with high cholesterol (levels above 240 mg/dl) to those with normal levels (below 200 mg/dl).9 Over the course of four years, researchers at Yale University measured total cholesterol and high-density lipoprotein (HDL) in almost one thousand participants; they also tracked hospitalizations for heart attack and unstable angina and the rates of death from heart disease and from any other cause. No differences were found between the two groups. People with low total cholesterol had as many heart attacks and died just as frequently as those with high total cholesterol. And reviews of multiple large studies have routinely failed to find correlation between cholesterol levels and heart disease.10 Mounting research like this has prompted Dr. George Mann, a researcher with the Framingham Heart Study, to go on record stating: The diet heart hypothesis that suggests that a high intake “of fat or cholesterol causes heart disease has been repeatedly shown to be wrong, and yet, for complicated reasons of pride, profit, and prejudice, the hypothesis continues to be exploited by scientists, fund-raising enterprise, food companies, and even governmental agencies. The public is being deceived by the greatest health scam of the century.11”
9. H. M. Krumholz, et al., “Lack of Association Between Cholesterol and Coronary Heart Disease Mortality and Morbidity and All-cause Mortality in Persons Older Than 70 Years,” JAMA 272, no. 17 (November 2, 1994): 1335–40.
10. H. Petousis-Harris, “Saturated Fat Has Been Unfairly Demonised: Yes,” Primary Health Care 3, no. 4 (December 1, 2011): 317–19.
One reasonable overview on the subject is http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2824150/
We estimated that 3.3% (95% CI 1.5% to 5.0%) of deaths
could be prevented if all participants had a processed
meat consumption of less than 20 g/day.
Diet has a lot to do with cavities.
Age might have a lot to do with cavities.
Regarding cavities: I recently read of a pre-agricultural tribe who had very high cavity levels due to a diet which was very high in nuts. Most H-G tribes appear to have lower levels of cavities than modern people at all ages I believe.
"so, tell us, how can you work at something that you know is bad for people's health?" and he answered:
"I am certainly used to the opinion that garbage food is bad for your health, and what I think is that garbage food does NOT exist. What it actually DO exist are garbage diets. If you eat one bag of chips every now and then, nothing bad will happen to you. However if you eat one bag a day for 10 years, you will probably feel the effects."
So the bottom line is as usual, everything in moderation. I mean, the often used analogy is with water. You can't live without drinking it and yet you can certainly die if you drink too much of it.
Isn't this like an overdone debate? I mean, you can definitely start an alarmist attitude towards almost anything you can think of, no?
And so on. No one thinks he does bad* things. Your mind forbids it or you would probably go insane. That doesn't change the reality.
* For various values of bad
Same with cigarettes. Indeed they have been undoubtedly linked to cancer, but still, if I smoke only one it really won't make a difference. Same with spam, one email every few months, as has been my experience with gmail for the past several years for example, really does not annoy me more than a mosquito could. There's a difference between working on a bad product such as, let's say hand grenades or other stuff actually made to harm, and working on a product that is definitely bad but only if you actually let it be, i.e. abuse it.
My point is that the blame is not on who makes the product, as the product maker does not make said product with the intention to harm, even if they do know that if you cross a line it will be harmful. The blame is on the person that lets this product ruin its life. Just like any drug. If I hit a joint right now, I guarantee that it won't harm me. But if I let it run my life and I stop working because I want to smoke weed, then the blame's on me, not on whoever grows the weed or even the one who sells it to me. Precisely the reason as to why we usually put age restrictions on certain things, as we deem children to be not capable of drawing this line between use and abuse of things that could end up being very harmful. However as we grow up we believe that we are then capable of taking responsibility for your life choices. Including giving yourself cancer or diabetes by only drinking cola and eating chips.
Here it is for easy reference: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM
Skinny people can get type 1 diabetes, but that's a completely different disease -- acquired hypoinsulinaemia, as opposed to hyperlipedaemia. (Note, neither diabetes is essentially about glucose; it just happens that hyperglycaemia is a symptom of both diseases, and Aretaeus didn't know better.)
The article mentions such scientific evidence as "nearly two-thirds of the studies cited there to repudiate Lustig's views were funded by Coca-Cola." Seriously?
Normally I wouldn't care - sugar alarmism = more candy for me - except that, as the article notes, "Lustig ... calls for sugar to be treated as a toxin, like alcohol and tobacco, and for sugar-laden foods to be taxed, labelled with health warnings and banned for anyone under 18." That's just bullshit extremism. Doughnuts, one of my favorite foods, can be part of a healthy diet just like anything else. In fact, sugar is fantastic for stimulating muscle growth [3], and can help with diet adherence during a caloric deficit [4].
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insulin_index - this page lists satiety indexes for common foods. Notice all the lowest scores are bakery goods and sugary snacks.
[2] http://ajcn.nutrition.org/content/early/2009/10/14/ajcn.2009...
[3] http://jcs.biologists.org/content/122/20/3589.full
[4] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11126336?ordinalpos=47&it...
[5] http://www.nhlbi.nih.gov/health/health-topics/topics/obe/ris...
[6] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19801534
Edit: People are taking my words out of context. This is my reply to another comment below that elucidates my meaning: "I advocate moderation and balance. Consume reasonable calorie and macronutrient (protein, fat, carbohydrate) quantities. Eat what allows you to do that. For me, those carbs come from doughnuts and candy but also from brown rice and pasta. Just like my meats include both lean meats (chicken breast) and fatty, delicious meats (bacon). Combine this with exercise and all you'll avoid all the scary things the article talks about."